AP FACT CHECK: Trump chose the race animus to lie to COVID

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WASHINGTON Donald Trump falsely declared at a weekend rally that public health authorities are denying the COVID-19 vaccine to whites because of their race.

The former president planted racial resentments in remarks that distorted public health policy facts and exaggerated the effects of race -aware antiviral treatment guidelines in New York.

From his speech Saturday night in Florence, Arizona:

TRUMP: The left is now rationing surviving therapeutics based on race, discriminating and denigrating… white people to determine who is living and who is dying. If you are white you do not get the vaccine or if you are white you do not have therapeutics. … In the state of New York, if you are white, you have to go behind the line to get medical health.

THE FACTS: No, white people are not excluded from vaccines, where there is plenty of supply. And there is no evidence that they were sent behind the line for COVID-19 care as a matter of public health policy.

Trump twisted a New York policy that allows race to be a consideration when providing oral antiviral treatments, which have limited supply. The policy tries to direct those treatments to people at greatest risk of developing serious illness from the coronavirus.

It says non-white race or Hispanic ethnicity should be considered a risk factor because long-standing health and social inequality makes people of color more likely to get sick or die from the virus.

Trump extrapolated from there to falsely assert that white people are being forced to go behind the line for health care and shutting out both from vaccines and therapeutics.

Michael Lanza, a spokesman for the New York City Health Department, told the New York Post that race is not used to deny treatment.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found late last year that Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people were nearly twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than non-Hispanic whites and more likely to be hospitalized. An earlier Associated Press review of the early waves of the pandemic found that COVID-19 was taking a disproportionately heavy toll on Black and Hispanic people.

CDC research in October reported that people in certain ethnic and racial minority groups were dying from COVID-19 at a younger age and a report from the institution on Friday said minorities were more likely who did not receive outpatient antiviral treatment than whites.

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